2012 is still a vivid memory for most of us. But it’s time to look ahead to 2013 and focus on the key trends that customer service professionals need to pay attention to as they plan for success this year. Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report is here.

PERSONALIZE CUSTOMER SERVICE

Trend 1: Channel Preference Is Changing Rapidly

Across all demographics, voice is still the primary communication channel used, but is quickly followed by self-service channels, and digital channels like chat and email. Channel usage rates are also quickly changing: we’ve seen a 12% rise in web self-service usage, a 24% rise in chat usage, and a 25% increase in community usage for customer service in the past three years. Expect customer service organizations to better align their channel strategy this year to support their company’s customers’ needs. Expect them to also work on guiding customers to the right channel based on the complexity and time sensitivity of interactions.

Trend 2: Mobile Solutions Are Becoming A Must-Have

Customer service mobile applications remain nascent as more companies focus on their mobile marketing, sales, and eCommerce mobility strategies. Expect companies this year to better align their mobile strategies, technology investments and user experiences across functional groups like marketing, customer service, eCommerce, and IT for consistent experiences. More companies will move away from duplicating their web presence for their mobile offering and will focus on deploying the right usage scenarios that add value to customers in a mobile environment, with focused user experiences that allow tasks to be efficiently accomplished.

Trend 3: Agile Service Is Becoming More Important Than Multichannel Service

Customers expect service to be agile — that is, being able to start an interaction in one communication channel or touchpoint and complete it in another. Each interaction should convey consistent and personalized data and contextual knowledge and information to the customer. Expect companies to continue to work on breaking down communication silos within and outside of customer service and standardizing the resolution process and customer service experience across communication channels and touchpoints.

Trend 4: Customers Expect Proactive Outbound Communication

Our latest Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey shows that 29% of enterprises are currently investing in proactive outbound communications. We predict that the range of channels for proactive outbound will increase, and will include service alerts, workarounds, customized cross-sell and upsell offers, and new knowledge base content. More powerful smartphones and increased bandwidth will allow proactive outbound applications to use rich media with embedded links to improve the user experience. Outbound communications technology will also be more deeply integrated into the contact to support closed-loop scenarios where customers want connect to an agent after receiving a message.

Trend 5: Voice Of The Customer Programs Are Operationalizing Insights

In 2012, Forrester saw more companies adopt voice of the customer (VoC) programs (68% versus just 55% last year). However, companies struggled to distribute the analyzed data and act on pertinent feedback to deliver quantifiable business value. Expect companies to leverage VoC data on two fronts this year: (1) better focus on end-to-end feedback processes to deliver the right insights to the right organizations and (2) use of customer feedback as a direct measure of operational success.

EMPOWER AGENTS FOR QUALITY SERVICE

Trend 6: Customer Service Is Moving From Cost Center To Differentiator

Customer service organizations are typically managed as a cost center. Key success metrics focus on productivity, efficiency, and regulatory compliance instead of customer satisfaction. However, we are seeing that customer service organizations are gradually adopting a balanced scorecard of metrics that include not only cost and compliance, but also customer satisfaction, and which are more suited to drive the right agent behavior and deliver better outcomes.

Trend 7: The Universal Customer History Record Is Personalizing Interactions

Customer service agents must have access to the full history of a customer’s prior interactions over all of the communication channels available in order to deliver personalized service and strengthen the relationship that customers have with companies. In 2013, vendors will continue to add the management of social channels to their customer service products. Companies will slowly continue to formalize the business processes and governance structures around managing social inquiries and move this responsibility out of marketing departments and into customer service centers. We also anticipate that organizational changes will be made to better align communication channel experiences owned by different functional organizations.

Trend 8: Knowledge Management Is Becoming The Jewel In The Customer Service Crown

Knowledge management solutions are a critical necessity for agents who rely on standardized answers to efficiently answer customer inquiries. It is also important to customers, as 60% of consumers use web self-service knowledge to find answers to their questions. Expect companies to adopt best practices in knowledge management: (1) make content capture from disparate sources (like email, social media interactions, and forum threads) easier; (2) make locating the right content easier; (3) allow agents and customers to rate and comment on content; (4) publish content without arduous review cycles; (5) tightly link case management and knowledge management solutions for greater service efficiencies; and (6) be more data-driven by using analytics to obtain insights on the value of content.

In 2012, we continued to see organizations using BPM in the front office in an attempt to formalize agent actions in an effort to standardize service delivery, minimize agent training times, ensure regulatory and company policy compliance, and control costs. Expect to see continued focus on guiding agents through the service resolution process, in addition to focusing on the end-to-end process, which may involve back-office tasks.We will see better reporting and analytics in order to monitor overall key performance indicators (KPIs) to optimize the success of each process flow.

Trend 11: Collaboration Is Improving The Quality Of Service Deliverered

We’ve seen increased adoption of collaboration in recent years. Trends include: (1) greater adoption of customer service and ideation communities that deflect contacts to increase agent productivity and customer satisfaction; (2) harvesting of community knowledge for inclusion into knowledge bases; and (3) agent-to-agent collaboration where organizations are breaking down the rigid agent tiering structures in favor for a more collaborative environment with subject-matter experts to increase first-contact resolution rates. However, the biggest trend that we have recently seen is that collaboration is becoming a corporate mindset. Companies are adopting real-time collaboration in the form of activity streams around objects such as sales opportunities, customer service cases, and content.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MATURING CUSTOMER SERVICE SOLUTIONS

Trend 12: Best-Of-Breed Solutions Are Struggling To Prove Their Value

We see more suite solutions from a single vendor being deployed for customer service. Buyers will be in a strong position to push best-of-breed vendors to demonstrate differentiation and measurable business value. In addition, best-of-breed solutions are prime acquisition targets.

This differentiation must then be weighed against the integration pain from coupling multiple customer service solutions together, the overhead of managing software upgrades from different vendors, the overhead of managing multiple contracts from different vendors, and the risk of these best-of-breed solutions being acquired.

Trend 13: SaaS Solutions For Customer Service Are Becoming More Popular

Customer communication channels and touchpoints are often managed by different functional organizations within a company. Few companies extend the measurement discipline that is a core strength of voice-only call centers to other communication channels. Expect customer service organizations to start moving forward with more holistic measurement programs for communication channels and touchpoints. This will allow customer service organizations to understand the cost and success of end-to-end customer journeys and pinpoint areas of addressable pain — such as an escalation from a mobile self-service session to an agent-assisted call. Expect organizations to also derive insights from their customer behavior to better contextualize and personalize end-to-end experiences increasing satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

Echoing the first point Kate makes. The most recent survey of 2,000 US social media users ("social care survey" by NM Incite) shows that 1 in 3 social media users prefer using "social care" (customer service via social media channels, primarily Facebook and Twitter) over phone customer service.

Nearly 1 in 3 of such "social care users", use social media channels for customer service on a weekly basis, with 9% using it daily!

While I agree with most, I'm confused by the specifics of the first identified trend:
"Channel Preference Is Changing Rapidly... but is quickly followed by self-service channels like chat and email."

Yes, channel preference is indeed rapidly changing, but how exactly are chat and email *self service* channels? Both chat and email require a direct connect with the service/support staff which by definition means the channels cannot be considered self service. Contradictory statements like that don't engender a sense of trust in the rest of the content even though I tend to agree with the remainder of the article.

Great points! I agree that channel preference is quickly shifting, making it more important for organizations to embrace not only chat and email but social media.

Most of your points illustrate the importance of organizations improving/upgrading CRM technology to keep pace with multiple channels communication without compromising service. That said, your point on SAAS is key. SAAS will enable a more nibble technology strategy.

Case management services must have the team of well qualified pediatricians, and they must be proficient in understanding the legal, financial as well as psychological aspects while dealing with the people facing severe head injuries.

I’d like to hear your views on where Expert System technology fits into the picture for automating knowledge management and, more important, knowledge delivery…especially for technical troubleshooting. Most customer self-service for technical diagnostics at this stage of the game involves opening up technical support knowledge repositories to customers via Search from a customer portal. As the product/service involved becomes more complex, Search becomes a really problematic approach, difficult enough for Support reps to use effectively, much less end-user customers. How do customers know the best key words to use? How do they interpret and prioritize a complex array of results? How does the company ensure that they aren’t taking the wrong approach and, worst of all, how do they even know what diagnostic path the customer pursued? Expert Systems quantitatively manage the relationships between customer diagnostic observations, all the known causes and the resources for answering diagnostic questions and performing fixes. The result is a guided experience where customers don’t need to guess what to do next… which is good. But even better is the potential to automatically monitor and dynamically improve the pathways from observations to solutions, ensuring the company not only knows the customer self-service experience, but can improve it in real-time. If not now, when do you think Expert System adoption will qualify as a trend unto itself for customer service organizations to consider?